Yes, Doom Now Runs on a Toy Video Walkie-Talkie
As someone who loves to reverse engineer and hack hardware of all descriptions, Aaron Christophel has got a lot of unusual gadgets lying around his workshop. Lately he has been digging into the operation of a cheap-yet-super-cool video walkie-talkie toy. This walkie-talkie naturally has a display, so it's easy to see where this is headed. That’s right: Christophel got it to run Doom.
The walkie-talkie may be a toy, but under the plastic shell Christophel found some reasonably capable hardware built around a mysterious multimedia chip called the TXW818. According to his reverse engineering work, the processor is roughly comparable to an ESP32 in capability, but uses a different 32-bit architecture more commonly found in ultra-cheap Chinese IoT products.
A look at the internal hardware (📷: Aaron Christophel)
Two hardware versions of the walkie-talkie were examined. The cheaper model came equipped with 2 MB of external SPI flash storage...
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